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Longmont-area father, daughter deal with her heroin use together

Courtney Maestas, 25, says she lost everything to the drug

By Pierrette J. Shields

Times-Call Staff Writer

Posted:
02/03/2014 05:46:37 PM MST

Updated:
02/03/2014 05:49:44 PM MST

Courtney Maestas, who started using heroin when she was 21, talks Monday about her daily struggle to overcome her addiction while her father, Dan Maestas, looks on. (Matthew Jonas / Longmont Times-Call)

Dan Maestas admits he has considered the worst — that his 25-year-old daughter will die with a needle in her arm.

Tears welled in his eyes and his voice caught in his throat Monday as he mulled it, however briefly.

The needle scar on Courtney Maesta's left arm is subtle. It is off center and looks like a smudge. But it is the point where she repeatedly injected herself with heroin. It has been healed for a couple of months now.

The 25-year-old woman is part of a new generation of heroin users who are becoming younger, both locally and nationally. A 2013 Drug Enforcement Agency report reported that younger users were turning to heroin, and Boulder County Public Health found that the mean age of users who took advantage of a syringe program for intravenous drug users was 30.2 years old in 2013, down from 42.6 years old in 2008.

Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, 46, died Sunday of a suspected heroin overdose, highlighting increasing use of the drug nationally. The DEA and local law enforcement officials say many new heroin addictions grow out of opiate-based prescription drug use. The street drug is generally cheaper and sometimes easier to get.

For Courtney Maestas, who works as a server in a Boulder restuarant, there was no direct line to heroin from prescription medications. As a child, she took Ritalin and Adderol, medications prescribed to treat attention deficit disorder.

As a teen, she dumped the prescription drugs in favor of marijuana. She and friends would frequently party together in Boulder, where cocaine entered the picture. She said it was easy to get on The Hill in Boulder's college student-saturated neighborhood. She recalled stopping drug use for years at a time because she felt like it.

When she was 21, a friend coaxed her to Denver to score some "opiates" and she tried black-tar heroin.

"I knew nothing of heroin," Courtney Maestas said, but she liked it.

Soon she pursued the drug routinely and found herself in legal trouble. A jail stint motivated her to stay clean for three years, she said.

Until October. A question about heroin and why it was so addictive was the trigger prompting her to seek opiates again. A call to a friend asking for a pill led her back to heroin. She initially smoked it, but quickly escalated to injections.

Courtney Maestas was clean for three years until she relapsed in October. Her father, Dan Maestas, learned of her heroin use after she was arrested last fall. (Matthew Jonas / Longmont Times-Call)

Dan Maestas found out about the heroin when he was summoned last fall to the Longmont Police Department. His daughter had been arrested after making a buy from a dealer police were watching.

For Courtney Maestas, the arrest was yet another wake-up call. She attends addiction recovery treatments, but relapsed as recently as December. She is a sore loser, she said, who likes to be in control of her life, so letting a drug control her is out of the question in the long term.

Dan Maestas wants to support his daughter so she can live the life he intended for her, he said. He wants her to pursue dreams and goals.

For now, she is staying with him in his Weld County home just outside of Longmont city limits.

Her father, who said he completed six tours of duty in the Navy and Army, said he has never seen anything as scary as his daughter's four days of withdrawl.

"I always have this fear that somebody might offer her (heroin) or some temptation might be there," he said.

He said heroin truly grips people and tries to control them. He advised anyone dealing with a friend or loved one who is suffering from addiction to remember who they are when they are clean. That, he said, is who they really are under the mask of the drug.

"It has got to be the most evil thing I have ever seen," he said. "It wants everything."

Courtney Maestas said she thinks about using every day and each night gives herself credit for resisting. It may sound cliché, she said, but she takes it one day at a time. She intends to win.

"Everybody has got something and people are going to judge," she said. "It is easy to judge. (Addiction) can take over the greatest people and bring them down to nothing."

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